Okay, let’s talk Zelda timeline. Any Zelda fan worth their salt has had more than a few uh, “discussions” about the series’ timeline. Many of these discussions tend to be about whether or not a master timeline even exists in the first place.

Nintendo’s on record as saying there is in fact a timeline for the Legend of Zelda series, but hasn’t elaborated much beyond that. Each game, particularly the more recent ones, drop some hints that they may be part of a greater continuity, but it’s not exactly a neat and tidy narrative. Generally it only takes slogging through a couple 500-reply message board threads to drive most Zelda fans to throw up their hands and declare “f–k it! I don’t care what Nintendo says! There is no timeline! Now let’s never speak of it again!”

Well, guess what? It turns out Nintendo wasn’t just teasing us. A 25th anniversary Zelda art book was recently released by Nintendo in Japan, and it contains the full, official, it’s-actually-real Legend of Zelda timeline. It’s been translated and can be scoped out after the jump…

I never thought I’d see such a thing with my own two eyes. A few of the things I found interesting about the timeline…

They Actually Included The Capcom Developed Handheld and 4 Swords Games

Nintendo has kind of a frustrating history of trying to pretend games not developed internally by their main Japanese studios don’t exist. The most egregious example being a recent Metroid timeline they released that completely ignored the Metroid Prime games (which were developed by their branch based in Texas, Retro Studios).

They even gave the Capcom developed Minish Cap (one of the most criminally underrated Zelda titles in my opinion) an important pre-Ocarina of Time slot in the timeline.